Wednesday, December 14, 2016

The “CIO Master” Monthly Book Tuning: Running IT as Growth Engine Dec. 2016

 Digital IT needs to become more dynamic and innovative to be a growth engine of the company.


Modern CIOs have many personas and face great challenges. It is not sufficient to only keep the light on. Regardless of which industry or the nature of organization you are in, being a digital leader will need to master the art of creating unique, differentiating value from piles of commoditized technologies, but more specifically, what are the digital-savvy CIOs doing to run IT as a business growth engine and digital transformer? Here is the monthly “CIO Master” Book Tuning.

Running IT as Growth Engine

  • Running Digital IT as a Revenue Rain Maker Traditional IT organizations are perceived as the cost center, running in an inside-out operation driven mode. Nowadays, with the exponential growth of information and lightweight digital technologies, forward-looking organizations across industrial sectors claim they are in the information management business, and there is a high expectation of IT to drive changes and lead the digital transformation. Therefore, the invisible divide IT vs. Business needs to go away, and CIOs should market themselves and advocate IT as an integrated component of the company, in order to run IT as an innovation engine and revenue generator for the business. CIOs must set priority right and have an IT transformation checklist on how to answer the questions such as: How do we get revenues now? How will we do in the future? How should IT help the company win businesses? How can IT contribute to customer acquisition and retention? And how to run digital IT as a revenue rainmaker.
  • Running a Future-Driven IT Organization to Catalyze Growth: Organizations large or small are at the digital journey, corporate IT needs to shift from a back office support center to a future-driven growth engine. Because more often information is the lifeblood and technology is the disruptive force of digital transformation?


  • Refining IT Role as the Digital Business Value Creator? IT continues to grow in importance to organizations, both operationally and as a competitive advantage. With emerging digital opportunities and risks, business leaders, including IT leaders are once again seeing the benefit of running IT as a business inside the business, that's the way to go. IT also needs to clearly define its role as a value creator for business, to enable growth and catalyze innovation.


  • Avoiding Three Traps in Calibrating IT Growth: IT is at the crossroad, either continues to be a commodity IT service provider or reinvent itself to become a business growth engine. Because the majority of IT organizations still get stuck in the lower-level of maturity and struggle to prove their unique value for helping the business gain competitive advantage. In order for the CIO to practice transformational leadership and for the IT department to reposition itself as the premium provider of competitive business solutions, IT needs to avoid these three traps in calibrating the growth and improve its efficiency, effectiveness, and agility?


  • Three Capabilities to Accelerate IT as Digital Growth Engine? Information and technology are pervasive, business transformation or any business initiatives today nearly always involves some form of technology implementation and information-bases insight; IT touches both hard business processes and soft human behaviors. Hence, forward-thinking companies have to empower their IT organizations to drive digital transformations, which enterprise capabilities should IT build to deal with the emergent digital complexity with the new characteristics such as hyper-connectivity, hyper-density, and hyper-dynamism, and become a growth engine of a high-mature digital business?

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